The Obama administration is now telling liberals that it is not backing down on its new health-care mandate, even as it coos of compromise to religious groups appalled by it. These messages may seem to be contradictory, but actually the administration has been quite consistent: Nothing it has ever said on this issue has been trustworthy.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has been the leading misleader. The administration, recall, has decided that almost all employers must cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance plans — even if those employers are religious universities, hospitals, and charities that reject those practices.

AdvertisementSo she has tried to make the mandate seem more moderate than it is. In USA Today, she writes that “in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith.” Taken at face value, this statement would seem to imply that Notre Dame could escape the mandate if it fired its non-Catholic employees. That policy would be outrageous: What gives the federal government the legitimate authority to tell a religious institution how it should structure its mission? But in fact the administration would make the university jump through several more hoops. It would also have to expel its non-Catholic students. And even these changes would not be enough, since the university would continue to do much more than attempt to inculcate religious beliefs in its students — which is another test the administration requires for the exemption to apply.

Sebelius says that three states have religious exemptions as narrow as the one the federal government has adopted. The notion that the federal government is imposing the model of three very liberal states — New York, Oregon, and Vermont — on the entire country is not comforting. But even in those states, some employers have been able to sidestep the mandates by, for example, organizing their insurance under federal regulation, which until now has not overridden conscience. The new mandate eliminates that escape route.

Joel Hunter, one of Obama’s pet pastors, says “this policy can be nuanced.” (“I have come to bring nuance,” as Matthew 10:34 does not say.) He is wrong. Either the administration will back off, and allow religious organizations to follow their consciences, or it will not. If it chooses the former course, it may still find a way to increase access to contraception — which is not especially scarce, by the way — but it will have to replace its current policy, not just “nuance” it.

Two bills in Congress would reverse the administration’s policy. Senator Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) and Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R., Neb.) have legislation to protect conscience rights generally. A bill from Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) would allow religious groups to refrain from providing sterilization and contraception. Both bills are praiseworthy, but both have drawbacks. The former, broader bill might allow liberals to conjure up hypothetical scenarios — what if a pharmacist decided he had a moral objection to painkillers? — rather than address the administration’s hostility to religious freedom.

The Never-Ending War

Liberals are the true aggressors in culture wars.
By Jonah Goldberg

If you’re not with us, you’re against us. President Bush popularized this expression after 9/11 to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: Countries couldn’t support or indulge terrorists and be our friends at the same time. But his detractors quickly turned it into a fairly paranoid vision of domestic political life, as if Bush had been talking about domestic opponents and dissenters.

The irony is that few worldviews better describe the general liberal orientation to public policy and the culture war. The Left often complains about the culture war as if it’s a war they don’t want to fight. They insist they just want to follow “sound science” or “what works” when it comes to public policy, but those crazy knuckle-dragging right-wingers constantly want to talk about gays and abortion and other hot-button issues.

AdvertisementIt’s all a farce. Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war (and not always for the worse, as the civil-rights movement demonstrates). What they object to isn’t so much the government imposing its values on people — heck, they love that. They see nothing wrong with imposing their views about diet, exercise, sex, race, and the environment on Americans. What outrages them is resistance or even non-compliance with their agenda. “Why are you making such a scene?” progressives complain. “Just do what we want, and there will be no fuss.”

Consider President Obama’s decision to require most religious institutions — including Catholic hospitals, schools, etc. — to pay for contraception, sterilizations, and the “morning after” pill. When “Obamacare” was still being debated, the White House had all but promised Catholic leaders that it would find a compromise to spare the Church from the untenable position of paying for services that directly violate their faith. Now that Obamacare is the law, the administration says the Church, like everyone else, must fall in line.

Or consider the still-raging controversy over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s entirely reasonable — albeit very poorly handled — decision to withdraw its funding of Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider. The Komen foundation is singularly dedicated to raising research money for, and awareness about, breast cancer. It’s the folks with those pink ribbons. The organization decided to withdraw its comparatively meager funding in part because Planned Parenthood doesn’t offer mammograms. (Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, was caught misleading people on this very point last spring.)

Other factors included the fact that Planned Parenthood is under investigation by Congress and the obvious but unstated fact that the organization is wildly controversial. It’s this last point that infuriates the Left. Pro-choice activists and their allies believe that Planned Parenthood should not be controversial, nor should abortion be up for discussion, either. If you have a problem with either, it is because you are an ideologue, an extremist, or a zealot opposed to the interests of womankind. And any attempt to suggest that abortion should offend the consciences of mainstream Americans, never mind such a revered organization as Komen, is simply unacceptable.

It’s clearly not about the money. Komen’s $600,000 in donations amount to less than .01 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget (as opposed to the nearly half that comes from taxpayers). It’s about making it very clear: Resistance is not just futile, but dangerous.

Without former Michigan Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak, President Barack Obama wouldn’t have gotten his health care overhaul in 2010 passed through Congress.

But Stupak, a pro-life Catholic who voted for the health care reform after being promised that federal dollars wouldn’t fund abortions, now isn’t happy with Obama.

Appearing Wednesday night on Fox News, Stupak made clear he opposes the Obama administration’s insistence that religious-affiliated organizations are not exempted from the law’s requirement that health insurance plans cover contraceptives.